That's horrendous. Palantir are the last company on earth I would want involved in patient records.

The public needed “assurance that their personal information won’t be harvested by Palantir for purposes that have little to do with their health”, Frankental added.

Assurance is free and does nothing. The only way to make sure is to not let them anywhere near the data and to not use them to build the platform.

Palantir is known for working closely with intelligence agencies and military organisations around the world, such as the CIA and UK Ministry of Defence.

Hmm…

[Palantir’s billionaire founder and chair, Peter Thiel], a libertarian, told an Oxford Union debate in January that the NHS makes people sick and should be privatised and Britons’ attachment to it showed they were exhibiting “Stockholm syndrome”.

Purdue Pharma has entered the chat.

The public needed “assurance that their personal information won’t be harvested by Palantir for purposes that have little to do with their health”, Frankental added. NHS England sought to allay such concerns. It stressed that none of the companies in the winning consortium would be able to access health and care data without its explicit consent; that it would retain control of all data within the platform; and that it would not include GP data. It said the new software would be protected by the highest possible standards of security through the deployment of “privacy enhancing technology”.

Mkay.

Palantir and Accenture, this project is bound to go well!

Is Palantir somehow connected to the Cambridge Analytica stuff?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The NHS has caused controversy by handing the US spy technology company Palantir a £330m contract to create a new data platform, triggering fears about the privacy of patients’ medical details.

The move immediately prompted concerns about the security and privacy of patient medical records and the suitability of Palantir to be given access to and oversight of such sensitive material.

NHS England has given Palantir and its partner Accenture a five-year contract to set up and operate the “federated data platform” (FDP).

Palantir is known for working closely with intelligence agencies and military organisations around the world, such as the CIA and the Ministry of Defence.

Thiel, a libertarian, told an Oxford Union debate in January that the NHS makes people sick and should be privatised, and that Britons’ attachment to it showed they were exhibiting “Stockholm syndrome”.

But he also warned that the NHS’s unhappy previous history of trying to bring its huge stores of data together could mean it struggles to convince the public of the project’s potential benefits.

The original article contains 429 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Companies hire hackers to help them harden their systems and prevent being hacked.

I don't know much about Palantir but if they advertise themselves as a spy company then maybe they could help shed some light on common methods used in the industry to prevent just that.